“Good Lord! but you’ve come to the right shop for that,” he said. “Why this countryside just grows them. All sorts of old mouldy monuments, in musty places, just choking with dry rot. Eh? That what you mean?”
“That’s just what I do mean.”
“Oh Lord?”
He was looking at her, quizzically ruthful. He foresaw himself being dragged into all sorts of weird places; hoary old churches, whose interiors would suggest the last purpose on earth to that for which they had been constructed, and reeking of dry rot—half an ancient arch in the middle of a field which would require wading through a swamp to get at—and so on. But while he looked at her he was conscious that if she had expressed a wish to get a relic chipped out of the moon, he would probably have given serious thought to the feasibility of that achievement.
“But that sort of thing’s all so infernally ugly,” he said.
“Is it? Ugly? Old Norman architecture ugly! What next?”
Mervyn whistled again.
“I don’t know anything about Norman, or any other architecture,” he said, with a laugh. “I only know that when I run into any Johnnies who do, or think they do—they fight like the devil over it, and vote each other crass ignoramuses. How’s that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s go and look at something of the kind this afternoon. Shall we?”
“No, my child. Not if I know it. You wait till you’re clean through this ailment of yours before I sanction you going into any damp old vault to look at gargoyles.”